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Tagged 'consumer rights'

America’s tech giants have been struggling to explain their privacy policies after reports that companies including Google, Facebook and Microsoft gave the U.S. National Security Agency’s PRISM program access to customer records. Mozilla, the free software community best known for such products as Firefox and Thunderbird, is setting itself apart from the pack. The organization, which was not implicated in the scandal, has helped to launch a coalition of advocacy organizations and some tech businesses that has a simple request for the U.S. Congress: “Stop Watching Us.” The website is designed as a petition that consumers can sign—and to date almost 500,000 have done so.

The petition calls for “immediate action to halt this surveillance and provide a full public accounting of the NSA’s and the FBI’s data collection programs.” As we have noted on this blog, anxieties around data and privacy are real, and consumers are increasingly looking for ways to maintain privacy in the social age. A longtime proponent of the Open Web movement, Mozilla is standing up for consumers by being proactive in its commitment to consumer privacy. Watch for more brands to emphasize privacy and security guarantees—Microsoft, for example, is running a privacy-themed campaign—and perhaps even tout a non-U.S. home base as a selling point, as Norwegian company Jottacloud is doing.